


So It Goes

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Melinda May needs a hug and a drink, POV Second Person, Post season 3 ep 07, SOMEDAY I will write a fic and it will be happy but this isn't that day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 07:27:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5197421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>There was no way this could have ended any better than it did. It was never going to end happily, but this might be the least devastating way for it to resolve.The best option—preserving his life—comes at the expense of his freedom. And May knew that…she pulled the trigger herself to make that call. And even if she was wrong, she was willing to live with another death on her hands.</em><br/><em>Another.</em><br/><em>Again.</em><br/>~~~<br/>In the aftermath of episode7, Skye doesn't know what May is going to say or do. She watches May watch the sunrise and thinks through the possibilities.<br/>[The MaySkye is strong in this one.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	So It Goes

**Author's Note:**

> It's a little unclear to me from the end of ep7 whether May is on a plane with SHIELD and headed back to the base with them, but this work was written with the idea that she was.
> 
> While I always imagine these two as having a closer relationship than canon scenes are letting on, this fic wasn't necessarily written in the Hearing-verse, so you can probably still enjoy it without having read that.
> 
> Skye's imagined scenarios were basically me playing out different scenarios of how I wanted the next chapter of Hearing to go with this story. Feel free to vote on your favorite scene in the comments.

There are a few ways this can go.

You know this as you stand there, watching her watching the sunrise, still as a statue in her seat.

_There was no way to see this coming._

There was no way this could have ended any better than it did. It was never going to end happily, but this might be the least devastating way for it to resolve. The best option—preserving his life—comes at the expense of his freedom. And May knew that…she pulled the trigger herself to make that call. And even if she was wrong, she was willing to live with another death on her hands.

_Another._

_Again._

You can’t imagine what she’s thinking. But you can imagine what she’s feeling.

_Stunned. Overwhelmed. Heartbroken. Betrayed._

You stand there, a few feet behind her, wanting so desperately to find the words that will comfort her, but you also know somewhere deep inside that she doesn’t need anyone’s words right now. She’s not hearing anything around her.

She’s not really here.

There are a few ways this can go.

You might get back to the base, and you know this isn’t her first time back in seven months, but you can tell this is the first time she doesn’t know where she’s going next.

When the plane docks, she doesn’t move at first. It doesn’t even seem even to register that you all have arrived. Only when you ask Mack to take Lincoln and set him up with a bunk, only when you stand just over her shoulder and say her name, only then does she close her eyes and pull in an empty breath and look around, look at you.

“Can I walk you back to your bunk?” you offer.

She stares at you but doesn’t answer, not even a nod as she unbuckles her seatbelt, stands, and walks past you. She moves stiffly, and you’re not sure if it’s the lingering dendrotoxins in her system from being iced the day before, or if it’s because she really was turning into a statue, petrifying just like you…and now Andrew…once did before the stone fell away and you became something else.

You follow and fall into step at her shoulder, clearing a path through the hallways with nothing more than your intimidating stare, perfected over the past few months and sharpened by the events of today. No one approaches you two, and you’re glad you don’t see Fitzsimmons or Morse so that they don’t have to receive your cutting warning glare, too.

She doesn’t need your help finding the right door, but the air inside her old room is stale, and you can tell that she hasn’t been in here in months either. _Did she even visit this room when she passed through the base like a ship in the night?_

You plunge through the dark to switch on her lamp. She stands in the doorway and takes the room in with dull eyes. It's not the look of someone who's glad to be home.

It hurts more than a little.

“I’ll get you some fresh sheets,” you offer, and escape to the hallway to fetch the linens from the closet.

Her door is still standing open when you return, and so is the ensuite bathroom door. You hear the shower running, so you shut the hall door and strip the bed yourself. Clouds of dust fly up as you pull the blankets back, and you wonder if it will all just settle back down on the new bedding in the next few hours.

You wonder if _she_ will settle.

The shower is still running, and the bathroom door is still open when you’re done.

You stand near the doorway and call in, “May? Can I bring you anything?”

There’s no answer, and although you know she might just not want to answer, you also want to be sure she heard you. You lean around the doorframe, peering cautiously into the bathroom, and your repeated words halt on your tongue.

She’s in there but not in the shower. She’s sitting on the tiled floor, only her jacket abandoned on the floor, like she started to undress and then forgot what she was doing barely a moment later. She doesn’t look at you.

But you won’t pretend you didn’t see this.

You step into the bathroom and turn off the water, and the steam filling the room begins to dissipate. You look down at her, waiting to see if she’ll acknowledge this, if she’ll snap at you or turn it back on or tell you to just get out and leave her alone…but she doesn’t.

You drop to your knees in front of her. You _have_ to touch her, you have to know if she’s a live wire, you have to know in what way you’re allowed to help…

Despite the warmth of the room, her skin is cold as your hand brushes her arm. She doesn’t pull back. She doesn’t push you away.

“May?”

You say it twice before she looks at you.

“Let’s get off the floor.”

She doesn’t resist as you slip your hands beneath her arms and pull her up as gently as you can. She doesn’t fight or insist she can do it on her own.

It kills you.

You lead her out and to her fresh bed, sitting her down and kneeling to pull off her shoes. Her eyes have fallen shut as you look back up at her face. You want to touch her cheek and make her look at you, to look into her eyes and stare into the darkness there until you can see the end of the tunnel…

But you can’t choose the way she deals with things. _She’s in shock,_ you decide, floating above the situation like the dust, still trying to absorb what has just happened, and this is the best thing you can do right now: give her a soft place to come down.

She turns her back on you and lies down without your prompting after her shoe slides off her foot, facing the wall and curling into herself like a wounded soldier. You drop her shoe beside the bed and stand, pulling the duvet from the foot of the bed up to her shoulders.

Like her asking for your call earlier, this is something you never thought you’d do for her. You never thought you’d need to.

“Get some sleep,” you tell her, brushing her shoulder gently though the blanket. “I’ll be around, if you need…anything.”

She doesn’t say anything as you turn out the light.

“I’m really sorry, May,” you offer under the cover of darkness.

You leave her like that. She still hasn’t spoken. The last thing you heard her say was “Do it.”

~

Or maybe that’s not what happens.

Maybe she moves as soon as the plane docks, slipping away from you and everyone else before any of you can offer a hand or a suggestion, and you lose her for a little while.

You give her a few hours to herself before you go searching, but you eventually find her in Coulson’s office because you both know that he isn’t there but his alcohol is. She’s on the floor in the corner, half-hidden behind crates and the desk, knees pulled to her chest and forehead on her knees. You almost didn’t notice her, but she’s a little too drunk to remember to cry silently now.

It's a miserable sight as you step silently around the desk and take her in--her shaking shoulders, her ragged breath, her buried head. Even alone, you still get the impression that she's trying to maintain a little control and is getting frustrated that the alcohol's preventing that. You don’t know how much was in the bottle when she found it, but the bottle by her feet is definitely empty now.

You feel…not _disappointed,_ exactly…after all, you understand the need for the cushion of alcohol when things are too much. But somehow, seeing this woman a tearful mess is worse than seeing her numb and silent. This May is so far from the woman that you know that it’s unsettling.

And you may not know what to say to a woman who just lost her ex-husband in ways that no person has likely ever lost someone…but you do have some experience with sad drunks.

It’s something.

“Hey,” you say quietly as you come around the desk and kneel across from her. “Hey,” you say again, to make sure she heard you. “May? Is it okay if I sit here, too?”

She doesn’t look up, doesn’t say anything, but you take that as a yes and sit down near her feet. You want to sit beside her and hold her, but she's wedged herself between barriers and you're sure that's not an accident. It’s nice to not be told to leave, so you just sit there, bearing witness to the pain, letting it be the evidence that helps you understand how deep this wound goes.

You don’t know how long you sit there, but the angle of the shadows slanting across the floor turns at least a little as you let the day come up outside the office’s windows. By the time May’s quiet sobs subside, you’ve rejected three concerned calls and sent _Under control_ texts to anyone you think might be looking for either of you.

May suddenly straightens up, looking around, but not for you. You guess what she wants and grab the wastebasket out from under Coulson’s desk, passing it over. She hangs her head over it and lets her stomach give everything back up.

You look away. Not just for her—for you too. You’d rather not remember this part.

“That everything?” you ask tightly, risking a glance over at her as she rests her cheek against the metal rim of the trashcan.

“No,” she says shakily before her stomach heaves again. Her voice is paper-thin.

You go to get her some water and sit with her until her stomach settles. You don’t talk.

She doesn’t push you away when you help her up off the floor. She lets you take her back to her room and put her to bed and promise you’ll check on her in a few hours. Then you go clean up the other mess.

She passes out and sleeps the rest of the day, and you think it’s for the best.

~

Or maybe that’s not what happens.

Maybe you don’t find her. Maybe you’ve searched all over the base and finally decide that she’s just _gone again._

You’re mad. Of course you’re mad. But you get it.

You’d probably run, too.

You get Lincoln settled in. You take a call from Coulson and pretend you don’t know where he spent the night.

You have to start your day after all that, so you eat something and drink something and then go to the training room to work out the stress of seeing Stepmom and Dad working cheerily to cage up people like yourself and then having to assist in locking up another person you used to think cared about you and being abandoned again by the woman you thought loved you.

No, your simmering anger has nothing to do with this being the third time you’ve been through this this year.

You stretch. You move through the motions your S.O. once taught you—how to center and ground everything inside you that moves, how to store your anxiety to be mined later, on your terms.

Then you flex your powers, focusing on the small things first—moving the stagnant basement air into a circulating breeze, rattling locker doors and dumbbells individually to work on accuracy, throwing a bag of marbles out on the floor and pushing them back together without using your hands…

Then you try out what you were able to do last night—catching a falling body with a focused, continuous, forceful push of air.

You try to catch yourself from falling forward onto your hands. Not on the ground, of course. You start out catching yourself on the bench press before you faceplant. But when you accidentally send the weights tumbling over with the pulse and you can’t lift them back upright on your own, you decide a wall might be a better place to start.

You’ve barely gotten the pulse right twice when you hear the training room door bang open. You turn, expecting to see Bobbi or Mack or even Hunter, but all you process is a blur of black before she slams into you.

May’s hands are fisted in your shirt as she spins you away from the wall and shoves you onto the padded floor.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she snaps, releasing you and letting you stumble back. “You’re going to bring down the base if you knock that wall out!” She’s trying to glare at you, but her eyes won’t quite focus. Even without her slurred words, you would know what’s wrong from the smell lingering on her.

You don’t know how much she’s had to drink, but it’s enough to help her leave the numbness behind. Now, she wants to feel.

She’s shrugging off her jacket, kicking off her shoes.

“Let’s go,” she challenges. “Show me what you can do.”

“You’re drunk, May,” you say, and you’re surprised to hear how disappointed you sound.  _It's not like you don't sympathize..._

She levels her gaze at you. “Then you should be able to end this fast.”

She flies at you, and you are annoyed to find that even with a current blood-alcohol content that would make a person take away her car keys, Melinda May is still a fighting savant. She seems to go into a mode that exists outside of her mental faculties, all instinct, no thought.

It should feel good, sparring with the woman again, seeing her in front of you and knowing you have her full attention…but it doesn’t. You see her throw her pain into every move and you wish you weren’t the reason why it’s there.

She’s good, but she’s still marginally slower than usual, and when you take her down and pin her face-first into the floor, she groans in a way you’ve never heard before.

“You okay?” you ask immediately, releasing her arm, which you twisted behind her. She grabs you though and pulls you off her, flipping over and pinning you in a move you’ve never learned.

“Grand,” she deadpans once she’s pinning you down, her tainted breath hot against your face. For some reason, she looks disappointed, which just makes you angry.

You send the pulse you’ve been practicing slamming against her, hoping it will knock her out so you can move on and clean up the mess she’s become.

The pulse throws her back, and you realize with horror that it was much, much too strong. She doesn’t land on the padded floor—she goes much further, thudding heavily to the concrete ground just short of the brick wall. You jump to your feet, covering the fifteen feet in two frantic strides.

“May?” you ask frantically. “Jesus. I’m so sorry! You all right?”

She’s already stirring, groaning before you get there, and you sit her up, leaning her back against the wall.

Concerned about a concussion, you almost start to ask her to follow your finger before remembering that she’s wasted and probably couldn’t anyway.

“You know,” she says, barely getting her eyes open, “the last time you did something like that to me, I left for six months.”

You don’t need to be reminded of that. “Yeah…if it hadn’t been for me..."

_It's fine. Everyone knows this is all my fault._

She opens her eyes and looks at you, and some of the haze seems to disappear. The anger fades a little. You know grief is just waiting for its chance to take the stage, though, and you can't stomach being the cause of that too. You stand up. 

“Come on, let’s get you up and to bed.”

She shakes you off after you help her stand, her pride obviously dented. “You couldn’t even pin me drunk,” she mutters, rubbing her side where she landed.

“It’s not like it would have been anything to brag about.”

May stares at you for a suspended second, and then she moves, grabbing at your clothes and spinning you again, but this time slamming you against the wall. You have no idea what she’s doing until you feel her hands spread flat on your ribs just as she leans in and presses her lips against your neck.

As coping strategies go, it’s not the least-expected one. But, just like the fight, you’re not going to use this situation as an excuse.

“ _Stop_ ,” you say, and when she doesn’t pull back right away, you fist a hand in her hair and yank her head away.

She gasps a little in surprise, but she looks startled, not afraid. 

You remind yourself that this isn’t her. You’re just meeting her grief, animated. _She’s in the anger stage_ , you decide. _She needs an outlet for it._

But,

“I’m not a punching bag or a toy for you to use,” you remind her.

Her eyes finally focus on yours. The darkness inside goes on forever. “I know,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Her hands are still on your ribs.

You don’t have a problem with what she wants. You wouldn’t mind an advance like this in other circumstances. But this isn’t the way it should be between two people who actually do care about each other. If you ever get to touch Melinda May the way you want to, you want her to be one hundred percent sober.

But her angst still needs release, and you have superpowers, trained and focused now, and you can give her what she needs without laying a hand on her.

So you do.

You spin and put her against the wall, releasing her hair but hovering your hands inches from her arms, pinning them without touching them. You crowd into her, letting her feel your nearness, but your hand stays a good foot away from her as you move it downwards and send gentle pulses, soft vibrations, rippling over her body. When she catches on to what you’re doing, her face changes, and her eyes close.

“Tell me to stop,” you say, watching her every move, and you don’t know if you’re hoping she does or doesn’t.

“Don’t,” she whispers urgently, and it’s the last coherent thing she says until she's coming with your name on her lips.

“ _Skye_ …” she gasps out, back arching against your restraint as you double the sensation on the places where she wants it.

 _Daisy,_ you correct to in your head as you push her over the edge.

You release the pressure holding her back, and she collapses against you, and this time you can’t stop your arms from going around her, from pulling her into an embrace, from holding her still and quiet and calm for as long as she’ll let you.

_She’s back._

_She’s here._

_She’s not herself._

_She won’t be for a while._

But you hope against all hope that she’s staying. And you hope against all hope that you’re wrong.

~

Maybe that’s not how it happens either.

Maybe she doesn’t run away. Maybe she sits on the plane, and you offer to walk her to her room, and she lets you, but then at the door, she says she wants to be alone, and you stay outside.

“My room’s still the same one,” you tell her, catching her eye for the briefest second. “I’ll be around if you need me.”

You close the door yourself.

_Why would she need you?_

Maybe she doesn’t surface during your training or crash into the room drunk or wander catatonic through the halls. Maybe she stays hidden, and you make yourself be SHIELD for the day, and you try to give her space she needs to take care of herself.

But when you can’t sleep that night and you hear the softest knock at three in the morning, you know it’s her.

You get up and open the door so that you can catch her before she changes her mind. She stands in the half-dark and doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t avoid your eyes either. Her eyes are darker than anything around her.

You step back and let her in.

You climb back into bed and hold the covers up until she slides in beside you. You face her but don’t touch her, unsure of how much she wants, still afraid she might bolt.

But she looks at you and reaches over for you first. Her fingers drag gently through your hair, which is inches shorter than when she last saw you, and when her hand brushes your cheek you can’t help raising your hand to cover hers and keep it there, keep her here, keep _this_ here…

She lets you. She doesn’t look away.

And she doesn’t pull away when you tug her hand to your lips and kiss her palm gently, doesn’t flinch when you reach out and touch her cheek, but she doesn’t lay like a corpse beneath you either when you lean over and kiss her lips. She buries her hand in your short, short hair, holds you there, presses close…and when you stop pressing your apologies in with your lips, she reaches for the rest of you and you reach for her and together you find a way to lie comfortably even as you hold onto one another for dear life.

You stay like that until the next sunrise.

You’re not sure who cries first.

~

Maybe none of these things will happen.

You’re still standing on the plane, and it’s still hovering between worlds, land and sky, night and day. You’re still not sure what to say. You still don’t think your words can do this moment any justice.

But your feet move, and then you’re at her elbow, and then you’re sitting down in the seat beside hers without asking. You don’t say anything, and she doesn’t acknowledge you. She’s far, far away.

So you just reach for her hand. _Slowly, slowly._

You touch her gently. _Soft, not stone_.

You lace your fingers through hers. _Still willing, still open._

She doesn’t pull away. 

She holds on.


End file.
